Wanted cultured ladies only! : female stardom and cinema in India, 1930s-1950s / Neepa Majumdar.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-247) and index.

Translocating : Hollywood stardom in India -- The split discourse of Indian stardom -- The morality and machinery of stardom -- Real and imagined stars -- Spectatorial desires and the hierarchies of stardom -- Monopoly, frontality, and doubling in postwar Bombay cinema -- Nargis and the double space of female desire in Anhonee -- The embodied voice : song sequences and stardom in Bombay cinema.

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. Neepa Majumdar combines readings of specific films and stars with an analysis of the historical and cultural configurations that gave rise to distinctly Indian notions of celebrity. She argues that discussions of early cinematic stardom in India must be placed in the context of the general legitimizing discourse of colonial 'improvement' that marked other civic and cultural spheres as well, and that 'vernacular modernist' anxieties over the New Woman had limited resonance here. Rather, it was through emphatically nationalist discourses that Indian cinema found its model for modern female identities. Considering questions of spectatorship, gossip, popularity, and the dominance of a star-based production system, Majumdar details the rise of film stars such as Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Lata Mangeshkar, and Nargis.

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